A hierarchical inventory tree can depict hierarchical relationships between objects using nodes and/or child nodes. For example, a hierarchical inventory tree can represent a virtual infrastructure in a datacenter. Such a tree can be displayed in a graphical user interface (GUI) used to manage datacenters, host servers (e.g., hypervisors), clusters, virtual computing instances, data stores, and/or virtual networks inside the datacenter.
In some cases, a datacenter can contain large numbers of hosts and virtual computing instances (e.g., hundreds of thousands of virtual computing instances). The virtual computing instances may be created, deleted, and/or moved from one host, cluster, or datacenter, to another, and the statuses of virtual computing instances, hosts, and/or other entities may change. A corresponding hierarchical inventory tree may be updated to reflect these changes. However, previous approaches to operating hierarchical inventory trees may suffer from slow speeds, especially in cases when the trees include large numbers of nodes and/or child nodes.